Computer freezes during post

[Equalist]

My computer was randomly powering down (no warning message or bsod, would just completely shut down and I'd have to press the power button to bring it back up) and after doing some research it appeared to be the power supply that was the problem. My fiance swapped out the power supply for me, and upon restarting the computer afterward, it now freezes during post and I am unable to get into bios. If I power down and reseat the ram, I am able to get into bios, but when the computer reboots on exiting bios, it freezes during post again, and I have to reseat the ram again to get it to load. If I allow it to load without going into bios, instead of getting the windows load screen, I get a blank screen with a flashing cursor at the top and it doesn't go any farther. Before the power supply was swapped out, the computer would load without issue and would only power down when high ram usage programs were running, such as antivirus, video, music, etc.
Any ideas? Not sure what info you might need, so just let me know.

 

[pjmelect]

Two possibilities spring to mind 1) your new power supply is not man enough for the job, try a bigger power supply or 2) when you take the memory out and in you move the graphics card, try reseating the graphics card.

 

[Equalist]

Took it down and tried checking it again. The first time it booted up, loaded fine to the post screen (it loaded faster than I was expecting and I had my back to it at the time) got an error message on the post screen (all I saw was the word error at the bottom) and then immediately crashed. Since then, when I try to bring it up, it doesn't even load the motherboard splash screen before immediately powering down again.

 

[Equalist]

I swapped back to the original power supply, and now it goes as far as the motherboard splash screen and then powers down. Not much, but still an improvement, and I still can't figure it out.

 

[kilo_17]

So it powered down before when you ran high usage applications? What are your specs?

 

[Equalist]

(going from memory, it doesn't boot up far enough to check)
500 watt power supply,
2 gb of ram,
300 gb hard drive
Sorry I don't have more info, if you can let me know where to look, I can get the info for you. I just generally work with software not hardware, so not completely sure what I'm doing when it comes to this stuff.

 

[kilo_17]

What is your graphics card? And does your motherboard have onboard video?

 

[Equalist]

Graphics card is a nvidia gf-xforce 6300
and yes, the motherboard has onboard video

 

[kilo_17]

Okay then, try it with the card taken out using the onboard video

 

[Equalist]

No offense, but why use the other video card? It's been disabled in bios and we can't enable it without entering bios and it won't stay up that long.

 

[kilo_17]

Well sometimes the video card is the cause of the problem. I assumed that if you take it out the onboard video is automatically enabled-that's the way mine is atleast. Try leaving just the bare essentials connected to the motherboard ( disconnect HDD, optical drive, etc.) and if you unplug the PC and pull the little coin battery out for a minute or two it might re-enable the onboard video. Maybe this will atleast allow you to get into BIOS

 

[Equalist]

I'm going to have to deal with it later. I don't know enough about hardware to figure out what to do with it and the fiance just went to bed.

 

[Equalist]

It's not the video that stops working, the whole pc powers down completely a few seconds after startup.

 

[Equalist]

Right now it won't stay running long enough for me to get into bios. I'm thinking about trying a new power supply at the least to keep it up and running long enough to do that much. Any suggestions there or am I wasting my time with that one?